As a website owner, you are using the internet to promote your products and/or services to your target customers. A corporate website can help you reach more people and interact with both current and potential clients. That means the marketing and customer engagement aspects of your business depend on your website.
If your website fails to function properly, your entire business might suffer from serious problems. This kind of situation normally happens because of DDoS attacks. Let’s discuss such attacks in detail.
What is a DDoS Attack?
DDoS is the acronym for a hacking attack known as “Distributed Denial of Service.” This hacking attack tries to make the target network or server unavailable to legitimate users. Hackers execute a DDoS attack by suspending or interrupting the services of a website host.
DDoS is different from DoS (i.e. an attack that involves a single computer and a single network connection). In general, DDoS attacks involve a lot of computers and internet connections to generate a globally distributed network problem.
The Different Categories of DDoS Attacks
You have to be knowledgeable about DDoS attacks if you want to prevent them from happening on your website. The following list explains the major categories of DDoS attacks:
- The Protocol Attacks – Attacks that belong to this category consume the actual resources of the website server or intermediate communication tools (i.e. firewalls, load balancers, etc.).
- The Application Layer Attacks – With these attacks, the website’s host will receive seemingly innocent and legitimate requests. The goal of an application layer attack is to cause the website’s server to crash.
- The Volume-Based Attacks – This category involves spoofed-packet attacks such as UDP floods and ICMP floods. The goal of a protocol attack is to consume all of the available bandwidth of the target website.
How to Mitigate DDoS Threats
Now that you know how DDoS attacks work, it’s time to discuss how you can protect your website from them. As a business owner, you have to make sure that your corporate website is up and running. The last thing you want to happen is to get loads of web traffic but end up with unhappy website visitors. Your visitors deserve to see the fruits of your hard work, not an error message saying your website is “down.”
At this point, the best way to prevent DDoS attacks is to get a website host that offers LiteSpeed web servers. These servers offer excellent performance, scalability, and security – three important factors that all website owners need. That means you can protect your website from DDoS attacks while ensuring great scalability and performance. Additionally, the developers of LiteSpeed web servers release regular updates. Thus, you can rest assured that your website is always safe against any kind of DDoS attack.
How Hosting Service Providers Stop DDoS Attacks
In this part of the article, you’ll learn how hosting companies prevent or stop distributed denial of service attacks. With this piece of information, you’ll be able to make proper decisions regarding the security of your business’ website.
Most hosting service providers focus on the following aspects when creating protection solutions:
- Detection – Web servers employ modern scanning techniques to detect the presence of DDoS attacks. Nowadays, servers can still detect attacks even if the hackers try to use different profiles and identities. Once an attack is detected, the server will alarm the entire system and stop the hacker from completing the DDoS assault.
2. Diversion – While scanning the website’s incoming traffic, the server should do two things:
- Divert or send the legitimate visitors to the actual website
- Keep the hackers out of the system
3. Analysis and Filters – Hosting service providers analyze and filter incoming traffic to make sure that DDoS attacks will be detected. Since the “bad website traffic” will be filtered out, your website will not experience any DDoS-related system failure.
4. Traffic Forwarding – Legitimate website traffic must be forwarded to the proper website. This aspect is extremely important since a safe website is useless if legitimate visitors cannot access it. That means hosting service providers forward real visitors to the proper website. This factor ensures that the business will benefit from the website being protected.
According to website owners, LiteSpeed web servers utilize the factors outlined above in their protection offerings. By signing up with a host that offers LiteSpeed servers, you can make sure that your website is safe from DDoS attacks.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks are among the biggest problems encountered by website owners. These days, hackers employ different attacks to render websites useless. A website that suffers from a DDoS attack will not be able to accept legitimate visitors. This is because the hacker will flood the site’s bandwidth with spoofed requests. As a business and website owner, you have to prevent this situation at all costs.
You hosting service provider can help you protect your website from DDoS attacks. Most providers offer protection solutions designed to prevent DDoS attacks in their systems. If you want to enjoy excellent performance and security, look for website hosts that offer LiteSpeed web servers.